My Mother – Portrait of a Complicated Lady: Part One

My Mother – Portrait of a Complicated Lady:  Part One

My mother was born Susan Patricia Chanler in London, 1921.  To understand her, you have to put her in context.

Her father Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler, Jr. was the son of one of the Astor Orphans, and his father was Lt. Governor of New York.  It’s hard to even begin telling all her family connections, so I usually do it by listing family names:

Livingston, Winthrop, Rutherford, Delano, Chamberlain, Ward (as in Julia Ward Howe), Whitney (as in the museum), Armstrong, White (as in Stanford) – and the list goes on.

My grandfather was an American though he went to Eton, then Harvard.  He was a banker and president of the Knickerbocker Club (the “most exclusive men’s club in New York”).  He fought in WWI and later was one of the yachtsmen who ferried the British Expeditionary Force from the beaches at Dunkirk.

On her mother’s side she was the daughter of Leslie Murray.  Her grandparents Mr. & Mrs John Archibald Murray, were both Scots.  Her aunt, Barbara Murray married Morton Stuart, Lord Doune, who then became the Earl of Moray.  This meant that her aunt was a Countess, and my mother spent her summers in a castle in Scotland.

In other words,  she was raised in a world of privilege not many can imagine today.  Her father was not rich – not ‘Astor’ rich; he was the first man in his family who had to hold a job (and he apparently resented it!), but before the war, he had more than enough money to live like a gentleman.  The family had 16 servants – not bad for 6 people.  What they found to do all day I can’t imagine.

My mother was the oldest.  Her younger sisters were of an age with Princess Elizabeth, who remained friends with her sister Clare until Clare’s death.  One family story from my favorite aunt – “I realized what sort of family I married in to when Clare mentioned she’d been to dinner at Buckingham Palace and they’d seated her next to the queen. ‘Oh my God’ I breathed sympathetically ‘whatever did you talk about?’  Clare fixed me with a puzzled gaze ‘Mutual friends, of course’…”

My mother was raised by a nanny.  She saw her parents for a few minutes at the cocktail hour.  Her mother had a little silver bell – when Susan became a nuisance, she rang the bell and Nanny came to take the offending child away.  Nan was a gamekeeper’s daughter and apparently quite a character in her own right.  Unfortunately, she subscribed to the British notion of child rearing, which, as near as I can tell, meant slapping them down whenever they showed the slightest sign of self-esteem.  It also meant that crying, even over an injury, was not tolerated, and emotion was banned from conversation.  Discipline was by ridicule, for the most part.  If my mother was particularly bad, she got a blue, rather than a pink ribbon in her nightie.  That meant that when her father returned from the city and came to say good-night, he would know she’d been naughty.  Nothing more was required.

Susan went to boarding school at the predecessor of Summerhill, a place called Dartington Hall.  She loved it there, though her brother Bronson, known hereafter as “Bim” said her language became so foul he wouldn’t let her around his friends.

Then the war loomed, and the family moved back to New York.  My mother was miserable.  She went to boarding school in Maryland and acquired a horse.  Hunting became a passion.  It was the headmistress who persuaded her parents to send her to college; it had never occurred to them!  She went to Sarah Lawrence as a biology major and decided to go to medical school.  This last produced an irreparable rift with her mother, who felt that “no lady would want to know what people’s insides were like”.

Her life in New York was wonderful.  Her grandmother had a box at the opera.  Her Uncle Bronson had, among other things, the original drawings to Alice in Wonderland, framed along the stairs.  His chauffeur taught her to drive, and she was the best driver I ever knew. 

The year she came out she was part of a centerfold in Life ‘Six Debutantes and the Dresses They Dance In”.  She described dancing all night, literally wearing out a pair of dancing slippers.  Her grandmother Murray who had the entire floor of an apartment building on Park Avenue (complete with a formal ballroom) gave her a choice of ‘coming out’ presents: a year in Europe, or a party of the same value.  My mother chose the party. 

The Hammond’s were family friends, Adele Hammond her college roommate.  So it was that she and John Hammond tooled around New York, going to concerts.  Once they went to Harlem to see Benny Goodman; it was her first date. (In contrast, my first date was to the junior play at my high school.  Sigh) When she dated someone more impecunious they rode the Staten Island ferry back and forth all night.

During the summer they went to my grandfather’s house in Dark Harbor, Maine.  From early on he taught his two oldest to be ‘crew’ and he was apparently fierce about it.  My mother became an expert sailor.  They also had a ‘cottage’ on the Hudson in Rhinebeck, down the road from Rokeby, the Astor mansion.  It was said in a review of the movie “Elizabeth” that the thing people forget about the queen is that she is essentially a country woman”.  The same is true of my mother.  She was much happier living the simple life in Rhinebeck than the more sophisticated life of a New Yorker.

But she went to college in New York.  Waiting for the term to start at NYU, she got a job as a lab tech for the Manhattan Project. 

There she met my father, Clifford Herrick.  A displaced Florida cracker, he went to Brown on the scholarship they gave to a local kid each year.  From there he got a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at Rochester (Home of Kodak, Rochester was the place to go for photo-chemistry).  The war was in full-swing when he graduated.  Rather than see him cannon fodder, his professors arranged for him to work for Urey at Columbia’s branch of the Manhattan Project.  There he met my mother.  The story is that he pulled rank on an underling, thus getting a seat next to Susan on an outing to Coney Island.  Then he told her everyone was meeting in the bar (they weren’t) and spent the day alone with her.  Ten days later they were engaged.

It wasn’t really a marriage made in heaven.  My grandmother Herrick was a Southern Lady and a formidable cook.  My mother’s mother had a cook – always.  She did go to the Cordon Bleu in Paris; there she learned to make an omelet.  She passed this knowledge on to her daughter so she could make a light meal “in case she had someone up after the theater”.  My father had to teach Mum to make meatloaf so she could feed him.  He was the ultimate patriarch, and it must have come as a shock to learn that my mother had no clue how to keep a house and not much interest in learning.  There is a wonderful story of their first apartment in New York.  Having decided to cook her first roast, my mother turned on her oven and a hoard of cockroaches streamed out.  My father, ever gallant, hailed a cab and went into the lab.  There he whipped up a batch of DDT and came home to save the day.

His next act, apparently, was to talk her out of medical school because, he said, he didn’t want a wife who was continually dragged out of bed to deliver babies...  Instead she got a master’s in organic chemistry from Columbia  For eight years they lived happily in rural Pennsylvania, keeping horses and goats.  My mother worked in a lab; she lost her first child because of it.  They made her take a year off before trying again, and then my brother Bob was born. 

I came along a year later.  The story is that when my mother was pregnant with Bob, her mother said “Don’t worry.  Children are no trouble at all!” Then she paused.  “Except on Thursday afternoon when Nanny’s off!”  When 1-year-old me was left with both my Grandmother and Nan (who remained part of the family until her death), my mother came home after 5 hours and found no one had changed my diaper.  Grandma didn’t know how and Nan claimed she didn’t because she felt it was nursemaid’s work and therefore beneath her.

Then both my parents got jobs with General Aniline and Film, then a rival of Kodak, and the four of us moved to Chenango Forks, a small town outside of Binghamton.  This is where my memories start.

Here endth the first lesson.